In light of the jury verdict in Apple vs. Samsung, the one-liners and jokes flew back and forth. One in particular, by Dan Frakes, has been copied and pasted all over the web, and it goes like this: "When the iPhone debuted, it was widely criticized for having no buttons/keys. Now people think the iPhone's design is 'obvious'." This is a very common trend in this entire debate that saddens me to no end: the iPhone is being compared to simple feature phones, while in fact, it should be compared to its true predecessor: the PDA. PDAs have always done with few buttons.

When the iPhone came out it was heavily criticised for not having a hardware keyboard (was often to compared to the then successful Blackberries); the author of this article was on of them.

PDAs were nice but they never caught on cause they weren't good enough. However I was one of those people who insisted the obvious thing. Phones should be converging towards PDAs. I even owned owned a Sony Ericsson P800.
Apple was the first company to design, market and sell the first real successful smartphone. They changed the market in a good way and should be credited for this.
Having good ideas in your lab is no good unless you manage to get it to the people

If I'm not mistaken you made similar comments on the lack of a physical keyboard in the months after its release. I could be wrong though, there were so many people with the same issue.
And when they finally realised that physical keyboards were a nuisance they came up with the lack of SDK and then the lack of copy paste etc etc.

A small initial point: I love the reduction of the role and significance of the Newton in your timeline to just a throw away reference in parenthesis. At least you are consistent.

I could argue the toss about this forever with you Thom, and with other motley bunch of techies, Apple haters and Android fans who want to minimise the role of Apple's innovation in the history of personal computing and to insist that the iPhone was just another incremental step in an evolution wrought mostly by others.

But why bother? You are not going to change you mind and frankly neither am I.

What is worth discussing is the significance of the Samsung-Apple verdict and what it means for the future. It seems fairly clear that given the opportunity to put to a jury its more or less full portfolio of evidence and testimony that Apple will stand a good chance of winning more such trials in the future.

So where does this leave Android, Google and the Android OEM community? If as seems likely this case marks a watershed after which Android OEMs will feel more vulnerable to legal attacks from Apple and have to restrict their product development to take on board the judgements handed down in this case, what should Google do? Should it counter attack with Motorola patents and escalate the legal war? Should it accept the partial but strategic victory that Apple has won and try to route around it?

What advice would you give Google about how they should exercise leadership in the Android ecosystem?

It seems clear to me that up until now Android has been a fire and forget weapon for Google, make it, releases it and just let things fall as they will. Google has positively tried to avoid exercising the same sort of hegemonic that Microsoft did in the old Windows ecosystem. Should Google take a more active role in managing the Android OEM community? Can it do that given that within that community so much power has accrued to Samsung?

I am posing such questions in a genuine way. The endless repeating of 'it's not fair' in ever more complex and well researched ways takes the debate no where. It happened, Apple won a big one, what happens next for Android and Google? I want to hear what a considered piece of advice would be from those that love Google and Android, those who want it to succeed.

When the iPhone came out it was heavily criticised for not having a hardware keyboard (was often to compared to the then successful Blackberries); the author of this article was on of them.

Nicely done, you just accused Thom of being... a hardware keyboard. Literacy FTW!

PDAs were nice but they never caught on cause they weren't good enough.

Riiiiiight, if you ignore the tens of millions of PDAs that were sold before the iPhone was even conceived of.

In reality, PDAs did catch on - just not with the tap-and-drool morons that jumped onto the iBandwagon.

Apple was the first company to design, market and sell the first real successful smartphone.

Uh, bullshit. The Treo line was a success for longer than the entire time the iPhone has even existed (to pick one example). Typical iFanboy historical revisionism.

They changed the market in a good way and should be credited for this.

Except that all of the changes that can be legitimately credited to Apple are changes for the worse. Curated computing, arbitrary & draconian app store restrictions, OSes and UIs that are crippled & locked down to the point where they lack functionality that was standard pre-iPhone, and an overall giant leap backwards in the sophistication of OSes and software.

At best, Apple deserves credit for sparking a race to the bottom & being at the forefront of finding new ways to cripple & dumb-down computers.

When the iPhone came out it was heavily criticised for not having a hardware keyboard

That was because before iPhone the primary purpose of a smartphone was writing emails. Even today, after 5 years of evolution of touch screen keyboards, hardware keyboard still beats on screen one for writing. You can recall a lot of criticism of iPhone email client too, which was sub-par compared to other smartphones.

However once you start targeting smartphone at people reading web, facebook and playing games, you can do away with hardware keyboard. As Thom shows, there were plenty of touch screen-only devices, so this was not a novel idea. The novel idea was to sell such a device as a phone on a mass market.

However having a published good idea in the lab that never makes it to the masses is still prior art.

I'm someone else that has had PDAs since the 90s My favorite was probably the Sony Clie that I think debuted in 2002. I had been planning on buying myself one when they came out, instead the weekend of their release my wife got it. I got stuck with the Palm III.

Even without the iPhone it is entirely plausible that 3 to 5 buttons on the front were the direction things were going. Even "soft buttons" that don't seem really like buttons.

I think Samsung did copy elements from Apple. Just like Apple has copied elements from others. I own and have owned several Apple and Samsung products. I have both iPad and Galaxy Tab (7) tablets, and use the iPad the most. My primary systems are Mac. My primary phones tend to be Android or WP7.

With that said, I'll say Samsung probably should end up on the losing end of some of the complaints brought against them by Apple. However, I don't think this trial fairly arrives at what that should be. There are too many things in this trial that I think weren't handled fairly or equitably, not the least of which is the jury getting through as quickly as they did. I think there were too many times Samsung wasn't allowed to bring in suitable prior art. That alone means the jury was not provided the information necessary to come up with a just/fair ruling. They ruled there was no prior art for some things because Samsung was not allowed to bring in the full prior art they found.*

* If Samsung failed to find it in time then that's an honest error and they should have been allowed to correct it; if they were going for a Perry Mason moment, then that wouldn't have been fair to Apple. I don't know what happened, but surely there was another way to resolve this than outright excluding it. Sanction the attorney, but don't punish the client (Samsung).